obituaries deleted?
Marshall Brain has died
151–160 of 176 posts
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or writing.
What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff. Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.
While I'm not saying it's not an emergent property of complexity, is this a falsifiable claim? Is there any proof of this? Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
By all means, if the science has advanced on this, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I don't really see how God's answer to losing a leg (or any such calamity) doesn't boil down to "literally just deal with it bro." Which is, no doubt, solid advice to someone who needs it.
That goes back to God’s definition. God gives strength to deal with situations. God doesn’t burden any soul with more than he can bear. In other words despite you not believing in prayer and not believing god answers your prayers, you are still only burdened with what you can bear.
I agree the author of the site does not understand God from the aspect that a Christian would (regardless of whether he is a former Christian). So while some may say by me saying that I'm about to pull a "True Scotsman" fallacy on what a True Christian would say I would counter by saying he is merely "straw manning" what God, the Bible, and a Christian would say and is taking things out of the context of the Gospel whole.
I haven't read his whole site, but probably have counted atleast 5 times so far reading it that he quotes Mark 11:24 which has Jesus saying, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." I think the issue for non-Christians is they take that statement to be defeated by people that pray righteously and don't get what they want. However for Christians this is not an issue Jesus states in Matthew 5:45 "for [God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Job is an example of this. My point is that to a Christian these two statements/ideas are not at odds though they may seem that way at first.
So, though Jesus doesn't explicitly state you don't get everything you've ever wanted just by praying for it he does state no matter who you are you good or evil you will have good and bad in your life. To me, I believe God does bless us for good/prayer just not in the way we may expect and ultimately all wrongs will be made right and justified just maybe not in this life. He is not a cosmic vending machine of which when we do a good work we are instantly gratified.
One of my main points in saying all this in a more general way is that to non-Christians The God of the Old and New Testament may seem to contradict himself, but I know there are answers to every one of those possible supposed contradictions even though not every person may immediately know the answer to every one of them.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal . The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
>on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have m…
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, one month into the pandemic, was mulling how it might be best for society if we just carried on as-is and accept that a lot of old people would die:
> As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
The chief science advisor of the UK described his meetings with the PM of the UK in 2020:
> “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
> Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be very surprised if the oligarchs didn't still employ humans. If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can." To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the…
Among the classes rich enough to employ servants, complaining about those same servants is a perennial thing. Even a valet or chauffeur who comes out of an elite training school and knows to stay at the margins of his or her employer’s consciousness, might still have small human quirks that irk that employer. So, machines may well prove preferable servants over humans.
I think complaining about the quircks of your servants may often be in the same category as complaining that your new designer handbag doesn't colour match well with as many of your dresses as you'd hoped.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff. Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.
While I'm not saying it's not an emergent property of complexity, is this a falsifiable claim? Is there any proof of this? Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges. By all means, if the science has advanced on this, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I've yet to see anything come close…
> is this a falsifiable claim?
Yes, we can observe animals at various stages of consciousness and correlate their brain structures (or lack thereof) with consciousness tests (such as the mirror test).
Assuming consciousness isn't primarily a function of brain structures, we'd expect to find animals, plants, or bacteria that defy our predictions of consciousness.
> Is there any proof of this?
Yes. Beyond being able to observe varying levels of consciousness in animals, we've seen the impacts of traumatic head injuries to people. Their entire personalities change, they sometimes become unconscious (think vegetative state). We are fairly confident when operating on brains which parts control what. And we have interesting diseases like split brain syndrome where 2 separate consciousness develop in individuals when there is damage to the bridge between the brain lobes.
> Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
This is a bit of a leap. With many physical sciences, we don't need to replicate things to make predictions, observations, and conclusions. We don't, for example, need to replicate a supernova to understand how stars are formed.
> But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
Have you looked and are you a biologist?
Look, I'm not a biologist, just someone interested in the subject. But from my own personal research on what it known, it's far less a mystery than what you might assume. For example, modern biology doesn't really recognize consciousness as being just a binary on or off sort of thing. There are multiple parts to it that all function in tandem.
The unfortunate thing is that consciousness is not simple. Because of that, it's not something that you could reasonably expect an explanation of in a comment. But if you are interested in a primer then this looks to be a good article [1]
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-did-consciousness-evo...
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't. But for full sharing to occur every time you invented anything you'd have to stop inventing until the population of the world had one.
What? How does that make sense? Is that genuinely what you think sharing means? Everyone everywhere has everything? Obviously that’s not the case. And even if it was, why can’t independent inventors create thing in the meantime? Have you heard anyone genuinely espouse this view? Is this what you think socialized healthcare means too? Everyone gets the exact same medical procedure at the same time too? Just be clear,…
Sorry, I'm not sure if you're replying to someone else - I didn't mention socialised healthcare or communism.
> the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible
This is what I was replying to. I'm saying that discovery comes with "inequality" in some sense, because it takes time to distribute and refine processes for making things. Only rich people 100 years ago could afford what would now be classed as the worst cars in the world. Now almost anyone can buy a car, at least in developed nations. But you don't need to think of it as "sharing", but rather as "markets". Goods and services that are worth scaling, and can be scaled, will be.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which utopia? I saw two dystopias. One the likely future of western society, another being one where your very thoughts are programmed
Do you think that this is not already the case? If not, what was the point of 15+ years of government education?
I’m more concerned with a trillion dollar industry programming peoples minds, but that’s a far cry from Elon musk putting a chip in your head to stop your “undesirable” thoughts.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#159A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" ( https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be th…
Interesting website. But there's one rationalization missing, imho: that God alters the timeline. That is, amputees are in fact healed in response to prayer, but nobody knows about it because God goes back in time and ensures the amputation never happened in the first place. Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire website yet.
Not the worst argument I've seen! I've been down numerous rabbit holes with regard to the "God is beyond time" concept. I even prayed for Abraham Lincoln at least once or twice, and started conceptually mapping out the number of prayers various historical figures may have tallied up over the centuries.
Now that I'm more of an agnostic utilitarian realist, it all seems a bit silly at this point, but there are certainly some fun thought experiments to explore.
Re: Marshall Brain has died
#160Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ possibly have?
A social network with people who's voices could serve as a check against one's internal mental state of the world around them going out of sync with the real one.
There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us.
Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality?
For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it.
It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.